AMENDMENT WOULD PUT VOTER ID

IN NC CONSTITUTION

FROM:

Raleigh, N.C. — House Speaker Tim Moore and other House Republicans filed a proposed constitutional amendment Thursday afternoon to ensconce a voter ID rule in the state constitution. The bill would ask voters to decide this November whether to add this paragraph to the constitution: “Photo identification for voting in person. Every person offering to vote in person shall present photo identification before voting in the manner prescribed by law.” The requirement deals only with in-person voting, not absentee voting. Voters wouldn’t necessarily see more details, including what sorts of ID would qualify, before voting. That would be laid out later by the General Assembly in a separate bill. Moore, R-Cleveland, said North Carolinians can look to other states with voter ID is already in place examples of what the legislature would approve.

The measure will start in the House, but the language has been discussed by House and Senate leadership, Senate President Pro Tem Phil Berger said. Legislators hope to wrap this session by the end of the month, which would put the proposal on the House and Senate floors for votes within the next few weeks. It must pass both chambers with support from three-fifths of the membership to go on the ballot. The measure wouldn’t be subject to the governor’s veto.

The General Assembly’s last push for voter ID was struck down by the federal courts, which found racial discrimination in that effort and in a number of other changes to voting laws included in a 2013 bill. That bill was rolled out a day after the U.S. Supreme Court struck down a portion of the U.S. Voting Rights Act requiring pre-clearance of voting law changes by the federal government.

The 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals decided in 2016 that the Republican majority targeted black voters “with almost surgical precision” in that law, noting among other things that the legislature had data in hand showing African-Americans were less likely than white voters to have the sort of identification required.

A previous version of that 2013 bill, proposed before the court changed the Voting Rights Act, would have allowed other government IDs, including expired ones. Allison Riggs, an attorney with the Southern Coalition for Social Justice who argued against the 2013 law in the lengthy court reviews that followed, said in a statement Thursday that legislators are “trying to trick voters into doing their dirty work for them. This is an obvious effort to implement a policy that has been shot down as being racially discriminatory.”

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Politics, politicians and political discourse have been my bread and butter for decades. Within them I quite literally made my living. They have been my passion — and my sporadic aggravation — for as long as I can remember. I have been elected to public office, I have written and delivered innumerable political speeches, published articles, made media appearances on behalf of my own and my employers’ constituents, and I have labored long and hard to build coalitions with both likely and unlikely allies on matters of public interest.

I have believed, for the most part, that my colleagues on the other side of the aisle shared my commitment to good government and to doing what was best for their constituents. I remember describing the opposing political party as the noble opposition. Respectful, or at the very least civil, dialogue between opposites was the leitmotif of that commitment. Now we must listen to people describe those in the opposite political party in the ugliest of terms: godless, un-American, crazy, enemies, traitors. Many people feel they can no longer be friends with someone who holds divergent political views, or they feel they have to agree not to discuss politics.

How, then, did we get from the civil norm I described above to the situation we see all around us today? I believe a number of factors have emerged that have driven division even deeper into our national psyche.

Since our founding, we have always been a country with marked differences. We fought an internecine war between our Northern and Southern states, and our Eastern states have thought, at times, that their Western counterparts were ill-educated and poorly mannered, while Westerners thought the East elitist and opinionated. Yet our political life managed to function with at least the patina of shared concerns, responsibilities, values and intentions. Until one party decided to ignore the public good.

Let’s take the apportionment of radio licenses. Since there are vastly more people interested in having a license than there are radio frequencies, the solution, from the beginning, was to allow the public to retain ownership of the airwaves, while a business or person would pay for and utilize the license, though the resource they exploited would be forever owned by the American people. As it became apparent that some broadcasters, especially after television was added to the airwaves mix, were using their licenses to push a singular agenda, lawmakers created the Fairness Doctrine. The doctrine essentially said that if you use a public resource, you owe the public a responsibility to be genuinely fair and balanced. This mandate worked quite well for 25 years, with radio and broadcast television listeners able to turn to virtually any frequency or channel and be assured they would ultimately hear an evenhanded discussion of the issues affecting their lives.

Today, we live in a vastly different environment. Thanks to President Ronald Reagan’s gutting of the Fairness Doctrine, the people’s resource is now being used almost exclusively to push a one-sided agenda, particularly on radio. Roughly 91 percent of talk radio is conservative, while 9 percent is progressive. Television talk shows are the opposite. They are far more liberal, but there are also far fewer of them, and they are clustered in the late evening hours, unseen and unheard by vast swaths of the American public. This imbalance has a direct effect on our national discourse and the polarization of our politics. Democrats are deeply upset that the airwaves — the public’s airwaves — are being utilized in a manner that smacks of censorship and an agenda being pushed. The issuance of a license does not give a station owner the right to misuse a publicly owned resource.

Add to that the loud, strident voices of the likes of Limbaugh, Hannity, Savage and Beck — denigrating and vilifying elected officials and ordinary citizens who dare to state a viewpoint different from theirs — and you have a volatile recipe for ugliness in public life.

Then, in 2008, came the election of Barack Obama. Unlike the current occupant of the White House, Obama had to be nearly perfect. A loving father, with a first and only wife, two beautiful daughters, and a strong record of service to his community, Obama was everything Americans have repeatedly indicated they wanted in a president. Yet for virtually his entire presidency he was mocked and maligned by Republicans who challenged his place of birth, his intelligence, his loyalty, his race and so much more. An entire movement, the tea party, arose to challenge his presidency. And in our own home state, the Republicans have tried mightily to disenfranchise voters and blatantly rig the political system in their favor in ways never before seen.

This is our country, collectively. It is not one political party’s or another. It is imperative we return to speaking in plurals, not singulars.

To read the full article in the Pilot, including the counter-point by John Rowerdink, past president of the Moore County Republican Party, click here.

THE STATE BOARD OF ELECTIONS & ETHICS ENFORCEMENT
APPOINTED ALL 100 FOUR-MEMBER COUNTY BOARDS OF ELECTIONS.

The long-awaited appointments to the Moore County BoE have finally been announced,
the result of the first full meeting of all nine newly-appointed State Board members.
Congratulations and thanks go out to our new BoE representatives,
Anne Baird Wells
and
Elizabeth Forbes Mangrum,
with our thanks to
Carolyn McDermott
for her many years of service to the voters of Moore County.

The county boards sets policy and makes the decisions about voting places, times, dates and other matters effecting the elections in our county. The decisions they make are fundamental in assuring the right to vote for each of our citizens.

Listed alphabetically below is the contact information for each of Moore County’s Democratic candidates for the November election. Please contact them if you are interested in helping with their campaigns.

AND RUNNING ON THE STATE BALLOT: